1. aaxine (should be part of xine package) will show you ascii art video. I don't remember if I've ever used it to play a dvd.
3. One option is to convert the pdf to html using pdftohtml and then view it with lynx.

At least on FreeBSD you can use mplayer with a vidix supported card to play almost every movie on the console. It's also fun to use this with an endless-loop video to have sort of a background image
The same goes for almost every program supporting SDL output (including mplayer as well) as you can compile SDL with libvgl support, set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=vgl and as a result see the graphical output directly on your console. Besides this mplayer supports aalib too, of course

I think of DVD's and pictures in ASCII more of a novelty thing than a serious option. Also, it's not a question of reading mere text from the ps/pdf - a lot of my files have a lot of graphics, if not purely graphical (i.e., musical scores).

Cacaview only supports bmp files (or so the error messages tell me).

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And the WORD was made flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1:14)

I dont know what is on your machine, but mine cacaview and asciiview works with bmp, jpg, png files without problems.

About ascii limitation in cacaview: You can zoom in/out image to make output looks more familiar to you
Zooming comes very handy when reading pdf documents via cacaview. (use pdftoppm for converting pdf to images - comes with xpdf)

For ps/pdf/dvi you can convert pages to images (specify DPI for custom resolution) and then view images via zgv, or if your OS doesnt have framebuffer via cacaview.

If that doesnt help you, you still can print pdf/dvi/ps documents and read them once they come out from printer

Maybe I will switch from kpdf+X11 to pdftoppm+cacaview/zgv after this post ...